Climate Lynx

It is a sunny morning and as I write I am grateful for the opportunity to sit in the warm sun. Marquette Public Radio is broadcasting a reading from Hemingway’s “A Sun Also Rises.” His description of trout and trout streams is always a chance to reflect on the beauty of nature. Hemingway spent much of his youth in Michigan, and it is here where his passions for fishing, wild places, and adventure were sparked. When looking at the pictures of Hemingway’s catch of fish, or for that matter, pictures of my father’s stringers of Walleye, there must have been a lot of large fish. Harvesting this many fish was sustainable in the early 1900s. In 1900, there were 76 million citizens. Today, there are over 330 million. Conservationists have long cautioned us to discipline our tendency to over-harvest. We did not listen with tragic results. Passenger pigeons in the US once numbered some 3 to 5 billion. The birds had survived for at least 100,000 years. In 1900, a kid with a BB gun shot the ...

  A once-in-the-history-of-man event is looming. Man has carefully identified and cataloged geologic time events for 200 years. The last time you may have been interested in this was to pass a high school science class. In 200 years, man has never defined any ending or starting geologic point while living it.  Many scientists devote their careers to understanding what has happened to the Earth over the eons. Understanding the past helps us know what will occur on Earth now and in the future. The science discipline that identifies geologic changes and documents these changes in the Earth's history is called stratigraphy. For geologists, archaeologists, and paleontologists, the work of stratigraphers is essential.   Except for high school or college geology classes, one rarely runs into stratigraphers' work unless you go to a state or national park where it is common to find descriptive signs. Once, while driving up a steep interstate highway in Wyoming, I saw signs nex...

The short answer is the science, while more nuanced, is the same. But the politics and the media coverage have changed. Ten years ago, when I started researching climate science, 97% of active climate scientists agreed the warming of the Earth, the rapid global warming, was almost wholly the product of trapped heat from greenhouse gasses. These excess greenhouse gases came from you and me burning fossil fuels. Greenhouse gases existed before us. We have simply been dumping carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere at a rate the Earth cannot safely process them. Ten years ago, the consensus among reputable science organizations was complete. Every reputable science organization said it was time to transition. The California government referenced 200 of the best science organizations in the world to make this point. Today the consensus of active climate scientists is higher than 97%, and reputable organizations remain steadfast defenders of the climate. There has been little c...